Board of Directors

Officers

Paul Balmer

University of California, Los Angeles

Paul Balmer
works in al­gebra,
more spe­cific­ally around ho­mo­lo­gic­al and ho­mo­top­ic­al al­gebra, cat­egory the­ory,
K-the­ory, rep­res­ent­a­tion the­ory, al­geb­ra­ic geo­metry and re­lated top­ics.
He is de­vel­op­ing a sub­ject called “tensor-tri­an­gu­lar geo­metry”,
an um­brella for sev­er­al geo­met­ric the­or­ies in­volving tensor-tri­an­gu­lated cat­egor­ies.

Paul ob­tained his PhD in 1998 un­der Manuel Ojanguren,
at the Uni­versity of Lausanne,
a Swiss uni­versity which has since ceased award­ing PhDs in math­em­at­ics
(for un­re­lated reas­ons, it is claimed).
After a few postdocs, Paul spent five years at ETH Zürich, then joined UCLA in 2007.
Paul was an in­vited speak­er at the In­ter­na­tion­al Con­gress of Math­em­aticians in 2010,
and be­came a Fel­low of the AMS in 2012.
He was awar­ded a Hum­boldt Re­search Award in 2015.
He joined the MSP Board at the end of 2016.

In his free time, Paul is a vig­or­ous prac­ti­tion­er of far ni­ente.
He also reached ex­pert­ise at be­gin­ner yoga, and en­joys play­ing a broad vari­ety of games.

Susan Hezlet

Susan P. Hez­let re­ceived her DPhil from Ox­ford in 1993,
work­ing with Dick Dal­itz in the­or­et­ic­al particle phys­ics.
This was a tri­umph of am­bi­tion over abil­ity and
she quickly switched roles to a ca­reer in aca­dem­ic pub­lish­ing,
work­ing briefly for World Sci­entif­ic and Spring­er
be­fore mov­ing to the
Lon­don Math­em­at­ic­al So­ci­ety
in 1998.
As Pub­lish­er for the LMS, she fo­cussed on the in­ter­na­tion­al col­lab­or­a­tions
that are uniquely im­port­ant to math­em­at­ics and its pub­lish­ing, most not­ably with the Dutch
Found­a­tion Com­posi­tio Math­em­at­ica.
She in­tro­duced the first elec­tron­ic sub­mis­sion sys­tem for math­em­at­ics journ­als,
which led to a great in­crease in the quant­ity of pa­pers sent to the LMS journ­als.
This was fol­lowed by a less­er, but still sig­ni­fic­ant, in­crease in the qual­ity
of pa­pers ac­cep­ted by the journ­als’ Ed­it­ors.
The sys­tem was even­tu­ally re­placed in 2012 by
Ed­it­Flow,
for which the LMS Ed­it­or­i­al Ad­vis­ory Boards are truly grate­ful.

Susan served as Treas­urer, and later Dir­ect­or, on the Board of the
As­so­ci­ation for Learned and Pro­fes­sion­al So­ci­ety Pub­lish­ers
for eight years.
This work provided fas­cin­at­ing in­sights to the wider world of not-for-profit pub­lish­ing
and the op­por­tun­ity to take an act­ive part in dis­cus­sion with gov­ern­ments
on the rel­ev­ance of peer re­view and pub­lish­ing to the pro­cess of re­search.
Her greatest achieve­ment was a series of wins of the ALPSP Con­fer­ence Din­ner Quiz;
her spe­cial tal­ent is know­ing next to whom to sit at din­ner.

In Oc­to­ber 2016, Susan moved to Ed­in­burgh.
This is not yet a re­tire­ment, more a change of pace and
the op­por­tun­ity to live in one of the most beau­ti­ful cit­ies in Europe.
Hav­ing spent many years en­joy­ing the road North to the High­lands and Is­lands,
they are now with­in easy reach.
Just as soon as it warms up, she'll be out there.

Ro­b Kirby (retiring chair & founder)

University of Cali­for­nia, Berke­ley

Ro­bi­on C. Kirby
is one of the founders of MSP,
and a pro­fess­or emer­it­us of math­em­at­ics at the Uni­versity of Cali­for­nia at Berke­ley.
An in­flu­en­tial spe­cial­ist in low-di­men­sion­al to­po­logy, he has had over 50 doc­tor­al stu­dents and was the first math­em­atician to re­ceive the U.S. Na­tion­al Academy of Sci­ences’ Award for Sci­entif­ic Re­view­ing.

Along­side Colin Rourke, John Jones and Bri­an Sander­son, Rob was a found­ing ed­it­or­i­al-board mem­ber of
Geo­metry & To­po­logy,
MSP’s flag­ship journ­al.
Through his work with
GT
and MSP, and by dir­ect en­gage­ment with his fel­low math­em­aticians, he has been in­stru­ment­al in rais­ing aware­ness of the fin­an­cial prob­lems faced by read­ers of sci­entif­ic re­search, and what the sci­entif­ic com­munity can do about it.
In 2013, the
Spe­cial Lib­rar­ies As­so­ci­ation
honored Rob’s work at MSP and else­where by award­ing him their
Phys­ics-As­tro­nomy-Math­em­at­ics
Di­vi­sion Award:

Dr. Kirby’s sig­ni­fic­ant con­tri­bu­tions with MSP be­ne­fit lib­rar­ies and en­hance the abil­ity of lib­rar­i­ans to provide ser­vice, and im­prove the ex­change of in­form­a­tion.

An out­door en­thu­si­ast, Rob has spent many hun­dreds of days in the Si­er­ras and the
Canyon­lands.
He has as­cen­ded Kil­aman­jaro with his wife Linda, son Rolf, and daugh­ter Kate;
McKin­ley with his broth­er
Doug;
and the clas­sic route on
Half Dome
with
Mike Freed­man
and Den­nis John­son.
He has also en­joyed many years of white­wa­ter kayak­ing,
with his first des­cents in the late 70s with Den­nis John­son and fine days since then with Joel Hass and Abby Thompson.

Rafe Mazzeo

Stanford University

Rafe R. Mazzeo
works in and around geo­met­ric ana­lys­is and par­tial dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions.
He has writ­ten pa­pers on geo­met­ric scat­ter­ing the­ory, Hodge the­ory and in­dex the­ory, spec­tral geo­metry
and vari­ous types of curvature equa­tions.
His par­tic­u­lar in­terest is geo­met­ric ana­lys­is in the set­ting of strat­i­fied spaces,
and he has had a hand in de­vel­op­ing the field of geo­met­ric mi­cro­loc­al ana­lys­is.

Rafe was a stu­dent of Richard Mel­rose at MIT, and ar­rived at Stan­ford im­me­di­ately after his PhD in 1986.
He spent two years at the Uni­versity of Wash­ing­ton in the early '90s,
but has been at Stan­ford the rest of his ca­reer.
He served as de­part­ment chair from 2007 to 2010.

Alice Peters (treasurer)

Alice Peters is cur­rently the pro­gram de­veloper for pub­lic­a­tions at the
Na­tion­al Mu­seum of Math­em­at­ics.
She also con­sults and provides ed­it­or­i­al, pro­duc­tion, and mar­ket­ing ser­vices to au­thors and pub­lish­ers, in­clud­ing provid­ing full e-pub­lish­ing as­sist­ance.
She was the co-founder of
A K Peters Ltd,
an in­de­pend­ent sci­entif­ic-pub­lish­ing com­pany, that was ac­quired in 2012 by Taylor & Fran­cis.
She has been act­ively in­volved in pub­lish­ing for more than 40 years,
first as math­em­at­ics and com­puter sci­ence ed­it­or for Spring­er-Ver­lag, both in New York and Heidel­berg,
and later as co-founder and pub­lish­er of Birkhäuser Bo­ston, and pub­lish­er at Aca­dem­ic Press/Har­court Brace Jovan­ovich.
She re­ceived de­grees in both com­puter sci­ence and math­em­at­ics from the Uni­versity of Chica­go,
as well as an MBA from Bab­son Col­lege, Olin School of Man­age­ment.

Alice en­joys tak­ing ad­vant­age of the many cul­tur­al of­fer­ings in New York City, and tak­ing long walks ex­plor­ing NY neigh­bor­hoods.
She takes great pleas­ure in in­spir­ing young chil­dren, in­clud­ing her sev­en grand­chil­dren, to ap­pre­ci­ate mu­sic and math­em­at­ics.

Colin Rourke

University of War­wick

Colin P. Rourke
is vice chair of the Board.
He is a pro­fess­or emer­it­us of math­em­at­ics at the Uni­versity of War­wick, and has also taught at
the Prin­ceton In­sti­tute for Ad­vanced Study,
Queen Mary Col­lege Lon­don,
the Uni­versity of Wis­con­sin at Madis­on,
and the
Open Uni­versity,
where he mas­ter­minded re­writ­ing the pure
math­em­at­ics course.

Colin has lec­tured for 49 years and hopes to com­plete
his half-cen­tury next year.
He has writ­ten pa­pers in high-di­men­sion­al PL to­po­logy,
low-di­men­sion­al to­po­logy, com­bin­at­or­i­al group the­ory and dif­fer­en­tial
to­po­logy, and has re­cently moved in­to cos­mo­logy where he aims to make
both dark mat­ter and the big bang re­dund­ant.

In 1996, dis­sat­is­fied with the rap­idly rising fees charged by the ma­jor pub­lish­ers of math­em­at­ic­al re­search journ­als,
Colin de­cided to start his own journ­al, and was ably as­sisted by Rob Kirby, John Jones and Bri­an
Sander­son.
That journ­al be­came
Geo­metry & To­po­logy.
Un­der Colin’s lead­er­ship,
GT
has be­come a lead­ing journ­al in its field while re­main­ing one of the least ex­pens­ive per page.
GT was joined in 1998 by a pro­ceed­ings and
mono­graphs series,
Geo­metry & To­po­logy Mono­graphs,
and in 2000 by a sis­ter journ­al,
Al­geb­ra­ic & Geo­met­ric To­po­logy.
Colin wrote the soft­ware and fully man­aged these pub­lic­a­tions un­til
around 2005; he man­ages their pro­duc­tion to this day.
With his wife Daphne, he runs a small­hold­ing in Northamp­ton­shire, where
they farm Hebridean sheep and Dex­ter cattle.

Abby Thompson

University of California, Davis

Abi­gail A. Thompson
was awar­ded a PhD from Rut­gers in 1986, work­ing with ad­visor Marty Schar­le­mann.
She spent the fol­low­ing year at the Hebrew Uni­versity in Jer­u­s­alem, fun­ded by a Lady Dav­is Fel­low­ship.
In 1987 she was awar­ded a Uni­versity of Cali­for­nia Pres­id­ent’s Postdoc­tor­al Fel­low­ship at Berke­ley, where her postdoc­tor­al ad­visor was Rob Kirby.
In 1988 she joined the U.C. Dav­is fac­ulty, where she has re­mained ever since, play­ing the cello and do­ing some math.
She has twice been a vis­it­ing mem­ber of the In­sti­tute for Ad­vanced Study, and has been an NSF Postdoc­tor­al Fel­low and a Sloan Found­a­tion Fel­low.
In 2003 she was awar­ded the AMS Ruth Lyttle Sat­ter Prize in Math­em­at­ics for her work in low-di­men­sion­al to­po­logy.

Ted Slaman (chair)

University of California, Berkeley

Theodore A. Sla­man
works in math­em­at­ic­al lo­gic, with a spe­cial em­phas­is on re­cur­sion the­ory. He re­ceived his PhD from Har­vard Uni­versity in 1981 un­der Ger­ald Sacks. After an NSF Postdoc­tor­al Fel­low­ship, he spent the first half of his aca­dem­ic ca­reer at the Uni­versity of Chica­go (1983–1996). In 1996, he moved to the Uni­versity of Cali­for­nia Berke­ley, where he in­tends to stay. He served as Chair of the Berke­ley De­part­ment of Math­em­at­ics dur­ing 2003–2006 and again dur­ing 2009–2010.

Ted is prone to in­tense en­thu­si­asms. These cur­rently in­clude com­bin­ing ideas and meth­ods from Di­o­phant­ine ap­prox­im­a­tion with those from re­cur­sion the­ory, listen­ing to re­cord­ings of Glenn Gould, and ex­plor­ing the back roads of the East Bay on a Vespa, but nev­er all three at the same time.

Paul Vojta

University of Cali­for­nia, Berkeley

Paul A. Vo­jta
re­ceived his PhD at Har­vard Uni­versity in 1983 un­der Barry Mazur,
and then spent three years teach­ing at Yale
be­fore com­ing to Berke­ley, where he has stayed ever since.
He works in num­ber the­ory,
con­cen­trat­ing on an as-yet poorly un­der­stood re­la­tion
between Di­o­phant­ine ap­prox­im­a­tion and a part of com­plex ana­lys­is known as Nevan­linna the­ory.
He re­ceived the
Frank Nel­son Cole Prize in Num­ber the­ory
from the AMS in 1992.

Paul is also act­ive in the
TeX
com­munity,
hav­ing main­tained the pro­gram xdvi for many years.
Cur­rently, he sup­ports the web-based home­work sys­tem WeB­WorK at Berke­ley.
He also en­joys read­ing, listen­ing to clas­sic­al mu­sic, and dan­cing west coast swing (but not at the same time).

Carol Wood (secretary)

Wesleyan University

Car­ol S. Wood
works in mod­el the­ory and its con­nec­tions to al­gebra and com­bin­at­or­ics. She was born in Pen­ning­ton Gap, Vir­gin­ia, and is proud to be a hill­billy.
She re­ceived a PhD in math­em­at­ics at Yale in 1971 un­der the su­per­vi­sion of Ab­ra­ham Robin­son.
Her aca­dem­ic ca­reer has been based en­tirely at
Wes­ley­an Uni­versity.
She is now the Ed­ward Burr van Vleck Pro­fess­or of Math­em­at­ics Emer­ita.

She re­ceived her PhD from the Cour­ant In­sti­tute of New York Uni­versity in 1968.
In ad­di­tion to be­ing a re­search pro­fess­or emer­it­us at Barn­ard Col­lege and Columbia Uni­versity, Joan is an af­fil­i­ated pro­fess­or at the Uni­versity of Haifa.
Spe­cial­iz­ing in knots, braids, 3-man­i­folds, and map­ping class groups of sur­faces, Joan is fre­quently in­vited to speak on these top­ics at meet­ings and con­fer­ences.
In 2005, the De­part­ment of Math­em­at­ics at Columbia Uni­versity and Barn­ard Col­lege held such a con­fer­ence in her hon­or.

Ron is a pro­fess­or emer­it­us at the Uni­versity of Cali­for­nia at Irvine,
where he was chair of the De­part­ment of Math­em­at­ics and dean of the School of Phys­ic­al Sci­ences.
While not do­ing re­search fo­cus­ing on low-di­men­sion­al to­po­logy, he is an avid scuba diver and jazz pi­an­ist.

After serving as sec­ret­ary-treas­urer, Ron re­tired from the MSP Board in June 2015.

Wal­ter Neu­mann (director emeritus)

Barn­ard Col­lege & Columbia University

Wal­ter D. Neu­mann
re­ceived his PhD in Bonn un­der Fried­rich Hirzebruch, and
then taught in vari­ous uni­versit­ies around the world (most re­cently at the Uni­versity of Mel­bourne)
be­fore tak­ing his cur­rent po­s­i­tion at Barn­ard Col­lege and Columbia Uni­versity, in 2000.
His re­search fo­cus is low-di­men­sion­al to­po­logy and re­lated areas.

Wal­ter has been an ed­it­or of
Geo­metry & To­po­logy
since its in­cep­tion,
tak­ing over as man­aging ed­it­or in 2005 from Colin Rourke (one of the founders of GT)
and passing the bat­on to Yasha Eli­ash­berg in 2012.
He re­mains an ed­it­or of GT and has been an act­ive mem­ber of the MSP Board of Dir­ect­ors since it was foun­ded.
Wal­ter serves on sev­er­al oth­er ed­it­or­i­al boards and is an avid sup­port­er of low-cost sci­entif­ic pub­lish­ing.
He is also a lender with the not-for-profit
Kiva Mi­cro­funds,
where he has helped more than 60 en­tre­pren­eurs build busi­nesses and im­prove their live­li­hoods.

Ma­ciej Zwor­ski (director emeritus)

University of Cali­for­nia, Berke­ley

Ma­ciej R. Zwor­ski,
as the first man­aging ed­it­or of
Ana­lys­is & PDE,
was largely re­spons­ible for as­sem­bling the journ­al’s first ed­it­or­i­al board in 2007.
He re­ceived his PhD in Math­em­at­ics from the Mas­sachu­setts In­sti­tute of Tech­no­logy un­der R. B. Mel­rose.
His re­search in­vest­ig­ates math­em­at­ic­al as­pects of quantum mech­an­ics, in par­tic­u­lar scat­ter­ing the­ory and mi­cro­loc­al ana­lys­is, as well as par­tial dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions.
Ma­ciej has taught at Har­vard Uni­versity, Johns Hop­kins Uni­versity and the Uni­versity of Toronto.